Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 2. The Romantic School in GermanyBrandes, Georg
History
Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 2. The Romantic School in Germany
Brandes, Georg
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Naturalism in literature; Romanticism
But even this is not the complete explanation. As yet we have only the
two elements, sensuality and cruelty; the third, religion, is present
also. It appears as the supplementary colour when we look carefully at
the first two. Remember Novalis's words, already quoted: "The divine
significance of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper is an enigma to the
carnal mind. But he who even once has drunk in the breath of life from
warm, beloved lips, whose heart has melted in the quivering flames of
holy fire ... he will eat of His body and drink of His blood for ever
more." The great Christian mystery was a subject occupying all minds
at this time, Kleist's among the rest. One of his intimate friends
was the most notable mystic of the day, the ingenious sophist, Adam
Müller. It may astonish us, or offend us, to find traces of Christian
mystic dogma in a pagan drama which has the Queen of the Amazons for
heroine; but to understand this, and many other kindred phenomena, we
must take the relative truth and justifiableness of this mysticism
into consideration. These men could not shut their religious ideas
into a cupboard, and keep them altogether apart from their lives and
actions. It was not only twice, or possibly three times, a year that
such a subject as the Lord's Supper occupied their minds; it pervaded
all their thoughts; they strove to see life in the light of this great
mystery. In the complete edition of Friedrich von Baader's collected
works (vol. iv. Anthropology), amongst a number of short essays, such
as: _On the Ecstatic Rapture of those who Talk in Magnetic Sleep, The
Vision Seer of Prevorst, Forty Tenets of Religious Love, &c., &c_.,
we find one entitled: _That, in the Spiritual, Good or Evil Meaning
of the Word, all Men are Anthropophagi_. It begins: "Man at heart,
or, to use the language of Scripture, the inner man, does not live on
tangible nourishment, on material bread; he lives, and that not in the
symbolical, but in the most real meaning of the word, entirely upon
other inner men, whose hearts and words are his food."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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